Creating a Culture of Engagement

Vermont Council for Quality’s 8th Annual Fall Quality Conference

COLCHESTER, Vt. — Join Vermont Council for Quality (VCQ) for its 8th Annual Fall Quality Conference on September 27th at the Doubletree Conference Center in S. Burlington and discover how your organization can increase engagement at all levels. Mark L. Blazey, Ph.D., President of Quantum Performance Group and author of Insights to Performance Excellence will address “Creating a Culture of Engagement”.

The VCQ Fall Quality Conference is a great networking opportunity for performance excellence advocates. Visit with professionals from the education, government, service, manufacturing, health care, and non-profit communities about their performance improvement challenges.
Throughout this event, participants will have the opportunity to learn from high performing organizations and leaders on how to improve engagement at all levels. The agenda has been designed to address the systemic engagement issues facing organizations as they move their organization forward through a continuous improvement system.
The conference will feature a Spotlight on Quality where leaders will share their quality practices, tools, and lessons learned that have helped them to increase and improve engagement at all levels. Participants will be able to informally meet with all presenters during our Best Practice Poster Showcase to further explore how these practices can benefit their own organization.

“We are very pleased to welcome back internationally renowned performance improvement expert, author, speaker, and consultant Mark Blazey, Ph.D. to join our event as the keynote speaker. Mark’s expert knowledge in driving high performance systems in organizations is invaluable”, says Laurie Emerson, Executive Director of Vermont Council for Quality.

Dr. Blazey has served as a member of the Board of Examiners and a senior examiner from 1995 to 1999 for the Malcolm Baldrige National Quality Award; served on the Baldrige Panel of Judges for the education pilot project to expand coverage of the Baldrige criteria to the education sector; and served as a lead judge for many quality award programs. Dr. Blazey has trained thousands of quality award examiners and judges for state and national quality programs including VT, WI, IL, DE, MN, AL, NE, KY, Costa Rica, and Aruba. He has set up numerous Baldrige-based programs to enhance and assess performance excellence for Fortune 100 companies and other organizations.

Dr. Blazey received his doctorate from the State University of New York at Albany in the fields of education policy, curriculum and instruction. He also received two masters degrees from Albany in educational psychology and statistics, and education.
For further information, please call Vermont Council for Quality at 802-655-1910 or visit our website at www.VermontQuality.org

Why the Baldrige program should be funded.

The Baldrige Performance Excellence Program was established by Congress to ensure that U.S. industries would thrive despite the serious global challenges in the 1980s. Here we are again in a very challenging time and the Baldrige Program could again help get our economy back on track.

The Baldrige process benefits the United States by driving economic development through increasing business productivity, workforce efficiency, and job creation.

In his 2012 budget, President Obama suggests to reduce the program by $2.2 million. The House Appropriations Committee has released the appropriations bill for the 2012 budget. There is no (zero) funding in it for the Baldrige Program.

There is a misconception that the Baldrige Performance Excellence Program is primarily an awards program. While the Baldrige Program is widely known for managing the Malcolm Baldrige National Quality Award, its main mission is to provide education and global leadership in promoting performance excellence.

In fact, the awards are only the culmination of the evaluation process that scores of organizations undertake each year, both at the national level through the Baldrige Program and through many non-funded parallel state and local programs. These evaluations are supported by efforts of thousands of volunteer experts who help these organizations improve their performance and competitiveness. It is estimated that these volunteers, leaders from all sectors of our economy, contribute more than 149,000 hours annually to improving U.S. organizations, as an act of patriotic service to their country. This time has an estimated value of $8.8 million.

Beyond this, countless other organizations use the Baldrige criteria as a framework for improving their operations. This widespread usage is evidenced by the approximately 2,000,000 downloads of the Baldrige criteria annually from the Baldrige Program website. Furthermore, the Program has been emulated by numerous award programs throughout the world, which use the Baldrige criteria for their own national quality programs.

The Baldrige Performance Excellence Program, a role model, is a public‐private partnership, so it is not entirely funded by the government. Yet government support is significant as it provides the consistency and continuity the Program needs; and without an efficient and effectively managed program, the entire stakeholder system would collapse.

It would send an unfortunate and misguided signal if we reduced a program that our government has supported for more than two decades as the model in performance excellence. Certainly this is not the right message to our U.S. companies that have learned firsthand how beneficial the Program is. And, with the popularity the Program has gained globally, it would not be a positive message to other countries.

We believe that the $10 million appropriation for the Baldrige Performance Excellence Program is one of the best investments taxpayers can make to promote economic growth, improve America’s competitiveness, and contribute to the goal of reducing our national debt and deficit.

13th Annual Recognition and Awards Ceremony

Vermont Council for Quality

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